“The question is, can you help me cross over?” I said. “And after I cross, come back again?”
“I know how to work the séance machines,” Chang said, “and I can do this, but you have to realize the cost. Even if we do contact this Dean, he might not have anything to say. Depending on how rough a soul has it when it crosses over … sometimes they’re going to be nothing but shreds. They won’t even remember what it was to be alive.”
“I don’t want to just contact Dean,” I said. That caused Chang to go still, and his perfect face to fold into a frown.
“Then … why are you here?”
“Because I know the machine can do more,” I told him. “I don’t want to contact the Deadlands. I want to go there. I want to find Dean, and I want to undo this mistake. He was never supposed to die. It should be possible to bring him back. And if you want to stop the Old Ones, I have to actually cross over. Either way, I can’t just commune with Dean’s spirit.” I fixed Chang with the stare I’d learned from my father, hard and unyielding. “Or am I wrong?”
He stared back at me, worrying the buttons on his suit vest and the chain on his watch, and narrowed his eyes. “How do you know so much about the doctor’s work?”
“Let’s just say I have a thing for machines,” I said. “Does it work to cross over or does it not?”
“You can’t,” Chang said instantly. Too fast. I was a good liar, and because of that I could spot a bad one in a second. “It was purely an experiment. It never worked right—”
“But it did work,” I insisted, standing. “At least once, correct?”
“Not really!” Chang cried. “The doctor … he …” He sighed and went to the window, pressing his forehead against the glass.
“I begged him to let me try. I didn’t want him to risk his body, his genius … but he wouldn’t hear of it. Dangerous, he said. He said he’d never send a boy to do a job he should be doing himself.”
He turned to me and ran his hands through his hair, disturbing the carefully Brylcreemed strands. “Now he’s that mess you see downstairs. He went from being sober and respectable and a great mind of science to a paranoid junkie. That’s what touching the Deadlands does to you. Not to mention the actual process you must use to cross over.”
I straightened my spine. If he was telling me all this, he was close to yielding, so I pressed my advantage. “I’m different,” I said. “I told you, I can cross worlds. It won’t affect me like it would a normal person, and besides, I’m not going there as an experiment. I’m going there to get the boy I love back, to save him from torment for all eternity. Either I’ll find him and we’ll return or I’ll be stuck there, but I’m not concerned with after. I’m just concerned with doing it.”
Chang exhaled. “I don’t know who this Dean is, but now I kind of want to meet him.”
He went to the stairs. “Follow me. I want to show you exactly what you’re in for.”
Elated, I followed. I was so close. I was going to get Dean back. Then I could decide what to do about the Brotherhood, the Old Ones, all of the disasters of the living Lands.
But first, Dean. Was it selfish? Maybe. But I couldn’t live without him, with his death on my conscience. I’d be useless to the rest of the world if I didn’t have him. I could function, get through the gray sameness of each day, but part of me would always be in the Deadlands, with him.
And I owed the rest of the world more than that. Not to mention I owed Dean. He wouldn’t be dead if he hadn’t tried to help me above and beyond anything I could have asked for.
Chang bypassed the doctor’s cube and led me to a back porch closed in with tin walls and a tar-paper roof. Everything was covered with cloths and looked as if it hadn’t been used in years.
Chang lit an oil lamp above the main mass of the device, the bulk nearly as tall as I was, and pulled the cloths off. “We use a Tesla coil to generate enough power, and the doctor’s apparatus opens a small door on the same electromagnetic frequency as the Deadlands. It vibrates on the same frequency as spirits. That’s how we communicate.”
He pointed to an aethervox equipped with a wax record that had been hooked into the apparatus. “This records their voices, and we play it back to get answers to the questions people ask.”
I watched as he moved around, smoothing the dust off things with his sleeve. So far it all sounded possible, but it wasn’t what I needed.
“The real trick is the other way,” Chang said. “The doctor had a theory that you could make a living person’s soul vibrate at the same rate, let it cross the door into the Deadlands temporarily and then change the vibration to call it back. Enable your consciousness to cross over.”
“How do you do it?” I asked, staring at the machine. It seemed impossible, but I was desperate and willing to try anything. I’d made peace with that fact long before I’d made it to San Francisco.
“That’s the part I need to tell you about,” Chang said, his expression somber. “In order to cross over to the Deadlands, your soul has to be untethered from your conscious mind. And to untether it, you have to die.”
I must have stared at him, my mouth open. That defeated the whole purpose, didn’t it? If you crossed into the Deadlands dead, you stayed. That was how they worked. That was why they were impenetrable even to someone like me, who could cross any living barrier between the Lands.
Draven’s taunting grin popped back into my mind. To get to the Deadlands, you have to die. He couldn’t be right. If Grey Draven was right about something and I was wrong, I was going to scream.
“Not permanently die,” Chang clarified, sensing my disbelief. “Just for a minute or two. To touch the same frequency as the dead. Then the operator brings you back and keeps you breathing, but your soul is free, floating outside your body.”
“And your body?” I said. This was sounding worse and more foolhardy by the second.
“As long as you’re crossed over,” Chang said, “your body is vulnerable, lying there in a coma. It’s soulless. Anything could fill the vessel. The doctor had some ideas to combat that, but we never got to try them. He came back and he was … well, different. Whatever he saw over there destroyed him.”
“And that’s the only way?” I said. I was desperate, but I also fervently wished there was an alternative.
“That’s it,” Chang said. “And we never found a trustworthy method of causing death, either. The doctor had me smother and then resuscitate him. I won’t do that again. I just won’t.”
I contemplated the apparatus, the horn of the aethervox, the power coil, all of it. This was the only way, I reminded myself. The only way I could begin to even contemplate trying to stop what I’d caused with the Old Ones. Dean’s soul was in there, just beyond what I could see, tormented and alone and afraid.
“All right.” I faced Chang. “If I find a way to die that doesn’t render my body useless or ask you to kill me, you’ll help?”
“Will you leave me alone until I do?” Chang said. “Honestly, I thought that whole speech would put you right off, but you just might be even crazier than the doctor.”
“Crazy and I are old friends,” I confirmed. “So will you do it?”
“Fine,” Chang sighed. “But only if you find a better way to go under. Smothering is dangerous—you might not wake up again if the other person presses too hard. You need something that will stop your heart without hurting the rest of you.”
I thought of Madame and her deft hand with laudanum.
“That part won’t be a problem,” I told Chang.
9
Beyond the Spirit Wall
I SLEPT FITFULLY, AND only slept at all because I was so exhausted my body decided it didn’t trust me to keep my eyes open. I didn’t dream, and that was something. Constant nightmares had been my companion ever since Dean died.